It shouldn't matter if people work multiple jobs. -Former VP of HR at Microsoft

Shelter has to be built on a property and maintained indefinitely, food has to be painstakingly extracted from the land, etc. People have to do that, because there is no extant alternative.

Ignoring land ownership for now, are the maintainers and farmers not to be compensated? That would be actual slavery.

Now you're making a completely different argument: Not that the problem is that you have to work in order to buy housing, but that the cost of housing is too high because of artificial restrictions on housing construction.

Which is totally true but is something else entirely -- if housing cost 10% of what it does now, it still wouldn't be free.

> It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage.

It's quite the opposite really. It would be better for anyone individually to build more housing on their land because they would make more money than the construction costs, so in order to prevent that they pass laws prohibiting nearly anybody from doing that.

These laws persist because of regulatory dysfunction. People benefit if the property they own is worth more and the property they might want to buy is worth less -- and any given person doesn't own most property, so the general advantage is to make housing cost less everywhere. But the laws that prevent it are instituted at the local level, in places zoned for single family homes that are predominantly owner-occupied, so the local voters are local homeowners who want local housing prices to go up rather than down. Meanwhile they don't get a vote in what the zoning is somewhere they might want to move to, so the rules make prices go up.

This is a real problem that could be solved by empowering individual property owners to build what they want on their own property, but what does that have anything to do with employers who are largely ambivalent to this? If anything employers should prefer housing costs to be lower so they can attract talent to their locality through a lower cost of living, and pay less in rent themselves.

> Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first

What are you proposing to do instead? You can't feasibly create more land, and what people actually want the land for is to have shelter. You can create more shelter, but that requires labor. It's never going to be free -- one way or another somebody has to build it. Somebody would even have to make the tent.

We could certainly make it cost less by removing zoning restrictions but less is not free.

Many unskilled labor jobs also pay more than the law requires, and there is basically unlimited demand for unskilled labor at low wages, so there is only a problem if the cost of living is higher than the wages unskilled labor receives in the market -- which in nearly all cases is because of artificial scarcity of necessities. Because otherwise the low wages would result in a low cost of living as necessities could be produced inexpensively through cheap labor.

If you let millions migrants come to the US to build housing and provide medical care and consequently made housing and medicine inexpensive, unskilled laborers in the US would be better off, not worse off. If you artificially limit the supply of those things so the cost of living remains high, you're screwed regardless of whether there are immigrants, because a marginal difference in the wages for unskilled labor doesn't hold a candle to a ten fold increase in the cost of living.

> Furthermore, most of these so-called unskilled laborers are in fact highly skilled surplus of the skilled labor market

There is rarely a long-term surplus of skilled labor -- or anything -- because that would just cause it to cost less, increasing demand (companies hire more) or reducing supply (people switch careers to ones that pay better).